Stanford in NCAA baseball's Indiana Regional

Updated 10:35 pm, Monday, May 26, 2014

On April 12, the Stanford baseball team was 11-16 and, according to coach Mark Marquess, in "survival mode."

Then left-hander John Hochstatter pitched a 6-3 win at Washington to avoid a series sweep, and the Cardinal went on to win 19 of their final 26 games and eight of their last 10.

Their reward came Monday when they were invited to the 64-team NCAA tournament for the 29th time in the past 34 years.

Stanford (30-23, 16-14 Pac-12) will open regional play against Indiana State (35-16) at 11 a.m. Friday in Bloomington, Ind. Regional top seed and host Indiana (42-13) meets Youngstown State (16-36) at 4 p.m.

The winner of the double-elimination regional will face the Nashville Regional champion next week in a best-of-three super regional, with those winners advancing to the College World Series.

Pac-12 champion Oregon State is the No. 1 overall seed. Sacramento State, making its first NCAA Division I baseball appearance in school history, will play Cal Poly in its first-round regional playoff at 6 p.m. Friday in San Luis Obispo.

Stanford was the only Division I team in the Bay Area to finish with a winning overall record. It ended in a tie for fifth place in the Pac-12 by winning its final four conference series, including a sweep of Utah over the weekend that lifted the Cardinal two spots to 45th in the RPI.

Nevertheless, they had to sweat out the NCAA selection show on ESPNU.

"We definitely were not sure," second baseman Danny Diekroeger said. "We were excited to hear we made it. We knew we had a good chance, but anything can happen."

Marquess said Stanford was a bubble team. "I thought if we swept at Utah we had a good chance, but you never know for sure," he said.

The key figures in the team's turnaround, he said, were pitchers Hochstatter and Cal Quantrill. Hochstatter (10-1, 2.62), a junior out of San Ramon Valley-Danville, struggled in the bullpen earlier in the season. But after moving into the rotation, he went 7-0 and wound up winning as many games as ace Mark Appel did last year.

Quantrill (5-5, 2.92), a freshman right-hander and son of former big-league pitcher Paul Quantrill, "got stronger as we went along," Marquess said. Quantrill is part of a freshman group that started 41 of Stanford's 53 games.

Stanford played one of the nation's toughest schedules but caught most of the strongest teams early in the season. It hit .292 over the second half of the season.

Center fielder Austin Slater takes a team-best .349 batting average and a 17-game hitting streak into the tournament.